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<h2>'Escaping e-mail hell: Revisited'</h2>
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<ul>
<li>
<time datetime="2017-11-05 00:00:00-07:00">Nov 05, 2017</time>
</li>
<li>
<time datetime="2020-09-09 00:00:00-07:00">Modified
on Sep 09, 2020</time>
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<li>7 min read</li>
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Categories:
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<h1>The problem with e-mail</h1>
<p>Most people spend a significant chunk of their working hours answering e-mails. With most people working remotely now, effective written communication is more important than ever. E-mail is part of the essential trifecta of systems that organize my life, along with my calendar and note-taking systems. The problem with e-mail, however, is that we spend too much time writing & organizing them without getting much value out of the time spent.</p>
<p>The inspiration for this story comes from Julie Zhuo’s <a href="https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/escaping-e-mail-hell-f55905f3862f">“Escaping e-mail hell”.</a> I highly recommend her essay series <em>The Year of the Looking Glass</em> as well as her book <em>The Making of a Manager</em> for anyone who desires to improve their relationships, productivity, and well-being in the workplace.</p>
<h1>How to write e-mails quickly & effectively</h1>
<p>To start, here's a summary of key points from Julie's article which addresses the question, <em>“How can I write more effective e-mails in less time?”</em> I recommend reading the original for specific examples. Julie’s key points are:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p><strong>Make sure your problem isn’t that you’re getting distracted while trying to write e-mails.</strong> Spending too much time writing and getting distracted while trying to focus are two separate problems.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Writing detailed and concise e-mails are a skill you need to practice.</strong> Like any other learned skill, you need to invest time & effort into getting better at it. Make a conscious effort to reduce the fluff in your e-mails until they're laser focused — the time savings will naturally come out of it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Avoid squishy words.</strong> Words matter — phrases like “I feel”, “I’m not sure”, and “perhaps” don’t convey confidence or clarity to the recipients. <a href="https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/active_and_passive_voice/active_versus_passive_voice.html">Passive voice</a> (i.e. assigning responsibility to an object rather than a person) is the plague of many e-mails and can cause the dialogue to not move towards a solution.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Have a purpose before even starting to write an e-mail.</strong> Think about specific questions that you need answers to, key points you want to make, and what you want the outcome of your e-mail to be. Create a high-level outline as a draft e-mail, then check for errors. With enough practice, this outline will <em>become</em> the e-mail you send, saving you unnecessary revisions of lengthy e-mails.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Highlight <em>Action Items</em> and <em>peoples' names</em> in bold.</strong> Don’t forget: you’re not the only person getting bombarded by dozens of e-mails every day. Make it easy for all of your recipients to be able to pick out what you expect from them, and by when. Corollary: Never copy anyone that doesn’t need to be on that e-mail chain. If you’re not sure, send those persons a separate short e-mail asking if they are working on that issue.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Never forward an e-mail to someone without a TL;DR.</strong> Forwarding a long e-mail chain to someone with nothing in the body except <em>“Thoughts?”</em> is like leaving a flaming bag of dog poop on their doorstep and running away. Using all the techniques above, summarize the key points & questions and what you need from them to go along with the forwarded e-mail.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<hr>
<h1>In practice</h1>
<p>After putting Julie’s sage advice into practice for more than five years now, I can attest to hours of time saved by avoiding needlessly long, unclear e-mails that required multiple revisions before hitting ‘Send’, not to mention the project hours saved from having to clarify badly written e-mails. My clients were happier, and they appreciated that I communicated with them clearly throughout the project.</p>
<p>Julie's advice is great for writing better e-mails, but there was still the problem of organization. I found that using folders wasn't getting me much time savings, so as I explain in my process, the trick is to not really organize them at all.</p>
<hr>
<p><img alt="Good E-mail Inbox" src="https://johntrinh.net/images/good-email-inbox.png"></p>
<h1>Stop using folders to organize e-mails</h1>
<p>I used to painstakingly sort all of my e-mails into separate folders by job number, but over time the number of folders grew too many, and I had to start throwing groups of folders into even more folders, organized by year or client. I realized that this was unsustainable, and I would frequently resort to using my e-mail client’s search function to look for a specific e-mail anyway. It took me more time to sort everything into folders than the time I got back in the few instances they even helped me find anything — a massive waste of time and energy.</p>
<p>One day I became frustrated with how my inbox looked and how long it took to find thing I'd archived months ago, and I scrapped all of my folders except for two:</p>
<ol>
<li>Action Items</li>
<li>Sent Requests</li>
</ol>
<h2>That's it!</h2>
<p>There are a few changes you need to make to your e-mail process in order to make this two-folder-only approach work. They boil down to some simple habits when dealing with each e-mail, and a change in philosophy. That philosophy is simple:</p>
<h1>Keep your inbox as empty as possible.</h1>
<p>This sounds intimidating, but I promise it’s worth the effort and makes things much easier once you're set up. There’s nothing better than having a clean and uncluttered inbox at the end of the day, organized and ready to go for the next day. You’ll hopefully never again have to give someone the poor excuse of <em>“Sorry, I didn’t have time read your e-mail yet...”</em></p>
<h2>The Empty Inbox Checklist:</h2>
<p>To make this work, you'll need to start relying on your e-mail client's search tool to find older e-mails. Make sure that whatever client you're using has a robust search & filtering tool. To make this easier, do the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>When you send e-mails, always include the project number and a short description in the subject.</strong> Similarly:</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>When you receive an e-mail, put a searchable text string (project number, name, and maybe a couple of keywords) at the bottom of your reply.</strong> This way, you can always find it later using search even when you didn’t write the subject line.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>When your message includes an action item, a request, or a question for someone, make a copy of it in the ‘Sent Requests’ folder.</strong> This makes it easy to pursue follow-ups and keep track of things that are stopping your work from moving forward.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>The Empty Inbox Process:</h2>
<p>In recent years, I've learned that the most efficient way to handle e-mail is by scheduling time for it in my day to do them all at once (batching) instead of getting distracted by every notification. This isn't going to work for everyone, especially in fast-paced roles where immediate responses are critical. But the more you can batch your e-mails, the less you'll be distracted throughout the day.</p>
<p>To streamline, check whether your e-mail client allows you to customize e-mail shortcuts, I use something like <code>Ctrl+A</code> and <code>Ctrl+R</code> to move e-mails into the ‘Action Items’ and ‘Sent Requests’ folders will enable to you to fly through your inbox.</p>
<p>Here's the process I use when I sit down for 30 to 60 minutes to respond to everything in my inbox for the day. Don’t worry if you can’t get to all of them — prioritize the ones that are most important, and move the rest into the appropriate folder to act on later.</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p><strong>Act on it now.</strong> The idea is to get all of these little things done and onto someone else’s desk so you don't have to worry about it anymore (for now). These are usually short, simple tasks ranging from a quick reply to something I close out in 15 minutes. If it's a larger task or you can't do it now:</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Move it to ‘Action Items’ and mark it as unread.</strong> The number of unread messages in this folder acts as a quick count of unfinished tasks. I find that these are usually longer tasks that require a block of focused work of more than an hour. Once I have a good number of these, I work on them during my scheduled flow blocks (3-4 hours of uninterrupted distraction-free work time).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Delete stuff.</strong> Don't be shy about deleting most of your e-mails. Most of them become useless after you've acted on them, and if it's actually important then it's likely documented somewhere else. The most common e-mails I delete are old responses in the same subject line. Most e-mail clients have a Conversation View which groups them all together.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Archive it.</strong> Once you think an e-mail chain has been closed out, archive it for a full record of the conversations that took place. These can also be e-mails you get copied on as an FYI, but don’t have any specific action items assigned to you.</p>
</li>
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